In May 2008, the girl's brother reported that he had been sexually abused by his father. This time it was reported to Mesa police. Detectives interviewed the suspect, Brian Hester, within three days, obtaining a confession about the girl's abuse that the Sheriff's Office had ignored a year before.

Sheriff's detectives, unaware Mesa police had arrested Hester, approached the family months later to try to restart their investigation. "We said, 'He's already been arrested,'" Hester's ex-wife recalled. "My daughter and I looked at each other and said, 'Oh, isn't that a little late?'"

The handling of sex-crimes investigations by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has been questioned since 2008, forcing the re-examination of more than 400 alleged assaults mostly reported between 2005 and 2008 -- including the allegations against Hester, who is serving a 24-year prison sentence for child molestation.

But until now, only the victims of the alleged assaults and a few sheriff's investigators have been aware of the full impact of MCSO's failures in these investigations.

An Arizona Republic investigation into the 400-plus reopened cases reveals the Sheriff's Office failed to adequately investigate reports of abuse and assault -- in some cases never interviewing a suspect or running a background check. Some cases were ignored -- the files were later found sitting in a drawer or in a deputy's garage. Those shortcomings, combined with lengthy delays in resolving cases, left alleged predators free to continue finding other victims, sometimes for years.

The delays also may have led to some cases never being prosecuted. For example, a sheriff's detective took 21 months to follow up on a teenage boy's 2006 allegation of abuse in his home. By the time investigators took the case to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office in 2011, prosecutors declined to proceed, citing no reasonable likelihood of a conviction.

The Sheriff's Office delayed for five years an investigation into an allegation against a convicted rapist. While the probe was on hold, another police agency received a report that the same suspect had allegedly assaulted a teenage girl. In another case, the agency ignored for a year one girl's allegation that her horse trainer had molested her. The suspect was accused of molesting three more girls before being indicted.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio concedes there were investigative failures in the special-victims unit, but defended his agency for trying to correct the problem after it came to light. He said in an interview last week that difficulty investigating sex crimes is not uncommon in police agencies, and that he felt his agency was being singled out.

"Right now, I'm comfortable with the management I have, that this situation has been resolved," Arpaio said. "I don't expect it, and I will not tolerate it if it happens again.

"I probably will give more special attention to this type of unit than I may have in the past," he added. "I'll probably look into it more closely myself to make sure it's running smoothly, and give it more resources."

Current and former employees say past staffing shortages were exacerbated by the agency's preoccupation with other priorities, such as illegal immigration, public corruption and animal-abuse crimes. When subordinates tried to call attention to staffing shortages and other issues, they were brushed aside by former Chief Deputy David Hendershott, said Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Lisa Allen.

Even when county supervisors provided more than $600,000 to fund six additional detective positions to investigate child abuse in fiscal 2007 -- 60 percent of the reopened cases involve minors -- none was added to the special-victims unit.

Sheriff's administrators now say they have no idea where those positions were added or what became of the money after it was added to the general fund. Arpaio has consistently said he can use his general-fund money as he sees fit.

Work on the cases is not over: In July, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office sent 59 cases back to the Sheriff's Office requesting more investigative work. County Attorney Bill Montgomery estimated that two-thirds of the sheriff's cases were properly handled. Sheriff's administrators agreed to do more investigation on 28 cases. The Sheriff's Office said it had exhausted all leads to track down victims, suspects or witnesses on the rest. The botched cases also are part of a civil-rights lawsuit that the U.S. Justice Department filed against the Sheriff's Office in May.

Lawsuits already have been filed against the county in some of the sex-assault cases, and resolving them could cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

"We're sad. We're sorry that we didn't put the resources in the sex crimes and the (special-victims unit). But it wasn't done. Why? I don't know," said Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan. "I wish we could turn the clock back and fix that for all those people."

Audit of sex-crimes unit

The problematic cases first came to light after the El Mirage Police Department publicly complained in late 2007 that the Sheriff's Office had failed to properly investigate dozens of sex-crimes cases while under contract to help police the community.

The number of cases under review grew beyond those in El Mirage, to include more than 500 as deputies discovered dozens had been left untouched in file cabinets, and 40 more were stashed in a detective's garage.

Investigators concluded that 95 of the 500-plus cases were properly handled but that more than 400 cases needed to be reopened to bring them up to the agency's standards.

The sheriff's audit broke down the primary reason for reopening the cases:

120 required contact with the victim, complainant or witnesses.

116 required other work that included making contact with an out-of-state victim or suspect, or reviewing another agency's report associated with the case.

68 were missing supplemental reports.

48 needed research or comparison with El Mirage police reports.

19 required contact with or research on a suspect.

17 needed detectives to do legal research with prosecutors.

5 required some additional evidence collection.

15 showed no sign that a detective had worked the case.

Those numbers, however, don't give a full picture of the investigative failures, a Republic analysis shows.

The sheriff's audit identified a single, dominant shortcoming in each investigation. The Republic's examination took into account every deficiency auditors identified for each case, some of which had three or four identified problems.

While the sheriff's audit showed 15 cases in which no investigation was conducted, a Republic analysis of the audit found that more than twice as many cases, 36, were not investigated.

The Republic also found that 138 cases needed contact with victims, compared with the 120 that the sheriff's auditor identified. And 70 needed contact with a suspect, while the audit put that number at 19.

The newspaper's analysis also found 48 cases that had at least some issues with evidence, and more than 200 that were missing supplemental reports, which reflects a lack of follow-up by detectives. In cases in which there was a complete record, one in six showed that detectives took 10 days or more to review the initial crime report.

Critics of the Sheriff's Office, including the U.S. Justice Department, have pointed to El Mirage to bolster their arguments that the Sheriff's Office disregards or discriminates against Hispanic crime victims and suspects. El Mirage has a large Hispanic population.

But The Republic's analysis found that hundreds of the audited sex-crime cases were reported in other communities, including Queen Creek, Mesa, Phoenix, Anthem -- even in Arpaio's hometown of Fountain Hills. And in a number of cases, the ethnicity of the victim was not noted. Often, neither the identity nor the ethnicity of the suspect was known. In cases in which ethnicity was noted, the majority of victims and suspects were White, followed by Hispanics.

Sheriff's administrators, now in the process of wrapping up a long-running internal probe into the botched investigations, blame the errors largely on Hendershott, saying he ignored concerns about staffing levels in the special-victims unit, and on supervisors in the division, who allegedly failed to monitor their detectives' work.

Hendershott, in turn, said the chiefs of the agency's various divisions set staffing levels. "In retrospect, I very much regret giving up the approval and review authority to the area chiefs regarding personnel because that was at the heart of the failure," Hendershott said. "Once we learned of the problems, the sheriff and I did everything right."

Hendershott said he took the matter to Arpaio as soon as he learned it was a problem, noting, "I met with Sheriff Arpaio every day, twice a day and sometimes more."

Hendershott was fired in April 2011 for alleged misconduct and has sued the office for wrongful termination.

The Sheriff's Office acknowledges systemic failures such as poor training, inadequate case-management protocols and ineffective cooperation with agencies that have expertise in dealing with abuse victims. In the last three years, it has addressed many of those shortcomings. Some of the sex-crimes cases, however, are still being investigated, and the Sheriff's Office anticipates potential lawsuits from victims and their families.

The first lawsuit is already in the works. Sabrina Morrison reported to her junior-high counselor in March 2007 that her uncle had sexually assaulted her on the Mesa property he shared with Sabrina's family.

The Republic generally does not name victims of sexual crimes. Morrison and her family granted permission to use their names in stories about their case, as have several others named in this series.

Sheriff's deputies followed up immediately with investigators on Morrison's case. Investigators accompanied the family to a center in Mesa for an examination, according to the family's claim. During the investigation, a nurse noted that there were no obvious signs of an assault, but investigators still collected samples that were later provided to the Arizona Department of Public Safety laboratory for testing, according to the claim.

Two months later, the lab reported that semen was detected on some of the items, and the DPS advised the Sheriff's Office that investigators would need to collect a sample from a suspect for comparison. Instead of collecting a sample from Sabrina's uncle, Patrick Morrison, sheriff's investigators closed the case as "inactive" in early 2008. It wasn't until June 2011 that the case was reopened and a DNA sample subsequently obtained from Patrick Morrison, according to the claim.

By then, with the allegations unheeded, Patrick Morrison had repeatedly abused his niece, according to the $30 million notice of claim the family has filed against the Sheriff's Office, asserting gross negligence in its handling of the case. He pleaded guilty to child molestation earlier this year and was sentenced this month to 25 years in prison.

Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Allen said the blame for additional victims lies with the abusers. "I understand our need as a society -- and the media's needs -- that they want to point a finger of blame. We have accepted that this is partially our problem," Allen said. "We've apologized for it.

"(But) if we had done more work and put somebody in prison, maybe they would have gone to prison and then killed some other inmate. Are we then responsible for that, too?" she asked. "At what point do you look at the situation and say, 'Yeah, the agency screwed up; they're trying to fix it. But the real responsibility for these crimes lies with the individual'?"

Overwhelming caseload

The special-victims unit was formed in the early 2000s, when the agency abandoned the practice of allowing detectives in the sheriff's six geographic district offices to handle criminal investigations that arose in their areas. The idea, part of a national law-enforcement trend, was to have specially trained detectives manage these cases. Sex-abuse crimes can be hard to investigate because the abuser frequently is an acquaintance or family member, making the decision to disclose the abuse and cooperate with prosecutors more difficult for the victim.

The unique nature of sex-abuse cases led to the development of protocols in each Arizona county that dictate best practices on collecting evidence, when to interview victims and suspects, and how to present a solid case to prosecutors.

"A lot of it had to do with the sensitivity toward child victims and the realization that a lot of the cases were family-type cases and were very difficult to prosecute," said retired Superior Court Judge Ronald Reinstein, who helped develop the protocols in the mid-1990s. "The family relationships, the emotions involved, the reluctance of kids and family to come forward -- we thought if we had a more coordinated approach, we could be more successful."

The sheriff's special-victims unit was built to address those issues. But only four detectives were assigned to the unit, and they drowned under their caseload, said Brian Beamish, a retired sheriff's captain who supervised detectives in the office. Within a few years, Beamish said, problems began to emerge that were exacerbated by the refusal of sheriff's administrators to add manpower or allow overtime.

"There's a science to it. Forensic interviews -- it takes time, you're dealing with fractured people. Just to get through to them ... takes time. Writing search warrants: Win, lose or draw, it takes about six hours just to write one," said Beamish, now a consultant in Southern California.

"At any given time, the sergeant of sex crimes has 160 man-hours to work with," Beamish said, calculating the available hours of four employees working 40 hours a week. "You can slice and dice it however you like, but you only have 160 hours."

Other priorities

The understaffing in the special-victims unit was due in part to the Sheriff's Office's priorities -- and the special-victims unit was not one of them, according to a half-dozen current and former sheriff's employees.

Despite a Maricopa County hiring freeze prompted by the faltering economy, the Sheriff's Office from 2005 through mid-2008 was hiring 45 to 50 new deputies annually and tackling initiatives that included counterterrorism and homeland-security enhancements. The office also embraced immigration enforcement, sending 60 deputies and 100 detention officers through a federal immigration-training program and creating a human-smuggling unit with at least 15 dedicated deputies.

Staffing in the special-victims unit remained unchanged during those years: four detectives.

Deputy Chief Scott Freeman wrote a memo to Hendershott in 2006 or 2007 decrying the inadequate manpower in the unit, according to the Sheriff's Office. Several other supervisors had already made similar complaints, according to former sheriff's administrators.

"He appealed to the chief deputy in a memo that said, 'Please, we need more people,'" Allen said.

Hendershott denied receiving that memo.

The Sheriff's Office was allocated more than $600,000 in fiscal 2007 for six full-time positions for "investigating cases involving sexual abuse, domestic violence, abuse and child abuse." The Sheriff's Office now says the six new positions were to focus solely on child-abuse cases. In any event, they cannot say where those deputies went to work.

"We don't know," Chief Deputy Sheridan said. "We've looked, and we can't find any of those position numbers which were allocated for child-abuse cases."

This is due in part to the acknowledged misallocation of roughly $100 million in agency funds that had patrol deputies being paid out of an account designated for detention officers. The Sheriff's Office resolved the problem last year through accounting measures.

"I'd get an OT tracking report, and I didn't even know these people. They would be getting overtime, and it's coming out of my budget," he said. "As commander (of the general-investigations division), overtime was an absolute no-no. If there was overtime, you sent people home. There were homicides where I had to send detectives home because they were out of hours. Sex crimes was no different."

Loretta Barkell, formerly the agency's chief financial officer, said she made Hendershott aware that money designated for detention purposes was being spent on patrol deputies, and vice versa. Feeling ignored, Barkell said she took her concerns about a variety of budget issues directly to Arpaio. "I would go to Arpaio if there were situations with overtime or other stuff where he needed to pay attention, and he just ignored me," Barkell told The Republic last year.

Barkell and other administrators have made sworn statements that they were particularly concerned with overtime being severely reduced for detention officers and patrol deputies while favored units -- for example, Arpaio's anti-corruption squad -- received unlimited overtime. An internal review of overtime for the anti-corruption unit shows more than $200,000 was paid out for nine investigators in 2007. The four detectives on the special-victims unit earned less than $60,000 in overtime in the same year, despite having half the recommended staff.

Current administrators blame Hendershott.

"Politically, you're going to blame it on the sheriff. I'm going to tell you with a very large degree of certainty ... we had a chief deputy in place that did not communicate very effectively on a number of issues," Allen said. "It was up to the chief deputy at the time to decide where those resources played out."

During an internal investigation that led to his 2011 firing, Hendershott justified the overtime disparity as a management prerogative. When one deputy chief complained about overtime spent on Arpaio's anti-corruption unit, Hendershott told investigators, "This is going to sound really cold, but if (he) is concerned about overtime ... he needs to run for sheriff. It's not his call."

Hendershott's latitude in exercising the power delegated to him by Arpaio was clear when he stripped the sex-crimes unit of two of its four detectives in 2007 so they could work for him on a training program in Honduras. The two detectives were diverted to produce training materials and fly to Honduras as part of a program that was Hendershott's brainchild. Billed as a mission to train police there, it also allowed Hendershott to collect photos of criminals to use in facial-recognition software he was promoting.

"It was a very worthwhile project and was only temporary," Hendershott said in response to written questions submitted last week.

Asked if using sex-crimes detectives on the Honduras project was appropriate, Sheridan said: "Absolutely not."

Protocols not followed

As the special-victims unit floundered amid a growing number of cases, they failed to do basic police work. And they did not follow the investigative protocol the county adopted in the mid-1990s laying out how sex crimes involving children -- which constituted a majority of the sheriff's reopened cases -- should be investigated.

The Arizona Legislature passed a statute in 2003 requiring each county to adopt its own guidelines. The protocol is supposed to serve as a road map for detectives in a best-case scenario, said Robert Bell, children's justice coordinator with Childhelp, a Phoenix advocacy center where police, prosecutors, therapists and physicians work with victims of abuse.

The protocol spells out the need for agencies to share information widely and promptly; to handle victims sensitively in order to achieve successful prosecution while minimizing trauma to the child; and to provide special training to investigators serving on sex-crimes units.

The Republic found repeated violations of the protocol in the cases it examined.

There is no evidence, for example, that detectives conducted a background check on suspect Robert Dean Sassman Jr., accused of raping a woman in 2002. Had investigators done so, they would have discovered that Sassman was convicted in Iowa in 1997 of sexually assaulting a relative's girlfriend. Upon his release from prison, he was required to register as a sex offender.

After the 2002 accusation, Sassman was accused of two subsequent rapes in Chandler before he was imprisoned earlier this year for failure to register as a sex offender in the Iowa case.

Investigative protocol also calls for detectives to promptly follow up with victims after patrol deputies take the initial report and confirm that the victim isn't in immediate danger.

The Republic found repeated failures to follow that guideline, including cases in which detectives took from nine to 21 months after the initial report before contacting victims.

That lag time left several victims and their families wondering whether the Sheriff's Office was interested in their cases. Several told The Republic that they were reluctant to share their story again with investigators because they felt their case was low on the sheriff's priority list.

One West Valley teenager went to a sheriff's substation in November 2005 to report that her father had molested her during a birthday party a year earlier. Another teenage girl at the party had filed a similar report on the same man with the Sheriff's Office in July 2004.

It would be four months before a detective followed up on the second report and conducted a forensic interview at Childhelp Children's Center of Arizona in Phoenix. During those months, the suspect's daughter was living with her family. But in retaliation for her report, they would not speak to her and would not give her money for school lunch. The girl, now grown, said she relied on teachers and friends to help her survive.

"I thought somebody would do something to protect me, and no one did. I was a 'troubled teen' that no one listened to," she said. "I was stuck in limbo for four months. I went through hell those four months. If it weren't for my teachers, I would have gone hungry."

The delays also meant other victims moved on with their lives, sometimes jeopardizing successful prosecutions.

In one case reviewed by The Republic, a 16-year-old boy told a counselor at a juvenile detention center in 2006 that he had been repeatedly molested by a man staying with his family. There is no indication in the case file that a detective followed up for at least 21 months. In those intervening months, the boy turned 18 and was released from detention. Court records indicate he went on to a life of drug abuse, committing petty crimes to support his habit and assaulting others when he was under the influence.

By the time the case was reopened in 2008, the victim's criminal record since his report prohibited him from accompanying a detective to confront the suspect. The Sheriff's Office eventually recommended charges against the suspect last December, based on the victim's statements. But the Maricopa County Attorney's Office declined prosecution, citing no reasonable likelihood of conviction.

Even if prosecutors had pressed the case, it would have been flawed because protocols, including background checks, prompt follow-up and coordination with other agencies, had not been followed from the start.

"In a criminal case, if law enforcement has strayed from that protocol, you can fully expect a defense attorney to question why these protocols weren't followed," Bell said.

Shoddy investigations

In 2005, the sheriff's contract to police the community of El Mirage and the increased caseload it brought with it, made failures within the sex-crimes unit impossible to ignore. El Mirage officials had hired the Sheriff's Office hoping to address its police department's problems with patrols, handling of evidence and shoddy investigations that had been exposed by a city audit.

Arpaio's office provided commanders and about a dozen deputies to help the city establish a more seasoned police force. Later, El Mirage signed a broader, $3.6 million contract for the sheriff's patrol, supervision and investigative services.

El Mirage residents soon began to question the quality of Arpaio's force. A group of parishioners at Santa Teresita Catholic Church became frustrated with hundreds of emergency calls that went unanswered or were dropped. They took the issue to the City Council in early 2007.

Sheriff's officials blamed faulty equipment and staff shortages. While fielding complaints from El Mirage, sheriff's officials were pushing the city to make the Sheriff's Office its full-time police force, a contract that could have been worth millions of dollars annually.

After repeated disagreements, the Sheriff's Office pulled out of El Mirage. When Mike Frazier took over as El Mirage police chief in October 2007, he sent the Sheriff's Office a message on the quality of the cases its investigators had left behind.

Steps to improve

Since the botched cases were discovered, the Sheriff's Office has increased staffing, enhanced technology and improved coordination with other agencies. Top managers have admitted that the special-victims unit had about half the workforce it needed in the years in question. The number of detectives in the unit now stands at 11. The office has increased training for supervisors, detectives and patrol deputies on sex-crime cases. It also is forging partnerships with advocacy groups and other agencies.

An automated case-tracking system alerts supervisors when cases have shown no activity for 30 days. A long-awaited records-management system scheduled for installation next spring will allow patrol deputies and detectives to quickly access records of prior contacts with suspects, victims and witnesses. The agency plans to add a full-time squad of five detectives and a sergeant to work directly with prosecutors, state Child Protective Services case managers and counselors to provide a more immediate response to victims.

Arpaio says he was unaware until recently of financial and management failures. Hendershott, now the scapegoat for many of the problems that plagued the agency over the last decade, says he informed Arpaio of the problems as soon as he learned of them. But the botched cases still hang over the agency.

A large tab could also loom as victims and their families learn their cases were among the 400-plus whose investigations were incomplete. That news is particularly sobering for those who were victimized by suspects who had been previously brought to the attention of the Sheriff's Office.

Sheridan, Arpaio's chief deputy, said he has had cursory discussions with the county's risk manager about claims such as the Morrison family's as the office braces for more.

"I'm sure this is going to happen. People see $30 million, that's a big deal," he said.

After the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office reopened more than 400 sex-crimes cases over questions about its police work, an Arizona Republic investigation reveals the full impact of the agency's failures.